Comment by CalRobert
10 months ago
A countdown on a traffic signal seems like a fun way to encourage drag racing.
Though it's nice on pedestrian signals.
10 months ago
A countdown on a traffic signal seems like a fun way to encourage drag racing.
Though it's nice on pedestrian signals.
The driver can usually see the countdown on the pedestrian signal anyway. It's not obvious that this would be worse.
Crazy idea that would be next to politically impossible in North America: Have every traffic light with a countdown also be a speed camera.
It'd eliminate the incentive to drag race, would give drivers more information earlier allowing better driving, and would generally make speeds limits actually a limit on roads with traffic lights.
First you have to deal with the issue of cities selling camera data to third parties and using it for license plate tracking and face ID
That's a solved problem in responsible cities, say New York. The cameras only take a picture if they see someone speeding [1], and once they see someone speeding a citation is issued and that's a matter of public record [2] so there is no data to sell.
But like I said, politically impossible, there's a very strong constituency and lobby of people who like cars and like speeding and will come up with excuses for why it couldn't work. For instance New York State restricts New York City to only putting speed cameras in school zones because of that group of people.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/speed-camera-faq....
[2] https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Open-Parking-a...
Is it a countdown until it turns green, or a countdown until it turns red? I think it's unlikely the latter would encourage drag racing.
I'd like to see both so that I can avoid coming to a full stop when it's red and on the other side of it avoid having to slam on the breaks.
Another example of "this is why we can't have nice things".